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Posts tagged ‘film review’

Nov 20

Mike Leigh’s Peterloo: Inequality and resistance in nineteenth-century British society

Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn) and Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland) review Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo which came out earlier this month.

Mike Leigh’s Peterloo recounts the weeks leading up to the infamous massacre of peaceful working-class protestors by the yeomanry at St Peter’s Field, Manchester on 16 August 1819. It is hard to identify a single protagonist, Leigh presents the viewer with a naturalistic bird’s-eye view, sweeping from mass meetings chaired by self-proclaimed ‘radicals’, young and old, male and female, to the intimacy of a husband and wife discussing the upcoming march in bed before going to sleep. Read more

Apr 28

A Little Chaos (2014): A commitment travesty

By Anna Knutsson @annaknutsson

Anna Knutsson is an MPhil student in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge. She is currently researching expressions of female involvement in medicine in Renaissance Florence.

Director: Alan Rickman

Cast: Kate Winslet, Stanley Tucci, Alan Rickman, Jennifer Ehle, Matthias Schoenaerts, Helen McCrory.

Lack of commitment is a constant complaint of many people in the modern west. Unfortunately for the period drama lover, this has now also extended into the glorious realm of hooped skirts and curvaceous furniture. Whilst A Little Chaos offers an appealing concept to its audience in the form of history from below, it fails to deliver. Following the gardener Sabine de Barra’s (Kate Winslet) work to create the renowned rock garden at Versailles, the film explores the role of women at work and the difficulties of getting over a personal tragedy, intermingled with a lacklustre love story and Louis XIV’s (Alan Rickman) search for freedom.

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Mar 10

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Selma through a woman’s eyes

By Amy Schaffman

The film Selma opened on 9 January 2015 to a barrage of criticism about its historical accuracy. Though unable to use any of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words due to copyright issues, the movie attempted to recreate the tense scene in Selma, Alabama on the eve of the passing of the 1965 Voter’s Right Act.[1]  Providing fodder for cinema critics were reenactments of several important touchstones of the American Civil Rights Movement: Bloody Sunday, the struggle between the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Commission (SNCC) and Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), as well as Martin Luther King’s relationship with Lyndon Johnson. Read more

Apr 18

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What papers won’t tell you: “The battle of Algiers”

By Marta Musso

I would like to inaugurate film reviewing on DHP with “The battles of Algiers” by Gillo Pontecorvo, perhaps the most important film on terrorism and counter insurgency ever made. It tells the story of the Algerian war by focussing on the years 1956-1957, the period of guerrilla warfare in the capital.

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